Traditionally, legacy video conference systems, such as video conferencing systems with endpoints using an implementation of the H.323 protocol standards (herein after H.323 endpoints), have been limited to communication with other endpoints within a local area network (LAN) of a corporation. There have been attempts made to enable the H.323 endpoints to seamlessly communicate with endpoints outside the corporate network through firewalls—some of which have been standardized in the form of International Telecommunication Union (ITU) protocol extensions to H.323, namely H.460.17, 18, 19, 23, 24. These standards have not be universally implemented and in many cases not implemented in a compatible manner by all endpoints. Moreover such standards only allow communications through corporate firewalls, but do not allow efficiently mixing some endpoints being inside the firewall and some being outside the firewall and only the minimal amount of traffic traversing the firewall boundary. Other attempts have been advocated by video conferencing equipment vendors which include deploying gateway hardware or software within the demilitarized zone (DMZ) (e.g., behind a firewall) of the corporate network. Such gateways also only allow communications through corporate firewalls, but do not allow efficiently mixing some endpoints being inside the firewall and some being outside the firewall and only the minimal amount of traffic traversing the firewall boundary. However, none of these attempts have been very successful as evidenced by the fact use of such legacy systems to make outside calls or join outside meetings on external bridges are still cumbersome or take up a lot of bandwidth at the corporate network boundary.
The conventional approach for video conference systems has been for a customer to buy the hardware (e.g., servers) and deploy the servers on the customer's internal LAN/wide area network (WAN) to provide video conferencing services for use internally as well as allow external users (e.g., outside their firewall) to connect up and participate in the call using the server installed within the customer's LAN/WAN. Such approaches deplete the customer's bandwidth in attempts to support the conference calls with both internal users and external users to the customer's network because traffic for the conference must be sent from external users to the server inside the network and then the conference data must once again be sent to each of the external user to the call.
Additionally, there are security concerns when there is communication with devices/systems outside of the customer's network. Due to the security concerns, most systems in practice that employ such approaches are only used for internal communication. Furthermore, configuring legacy systems and systems using the conventional approach requires a great deal of administrative work and in house knowledge on the customer side. As such, an improved approach to video conferencing systems is needed.